WIRED's biggest stories, delivered to your inbox

Maker Mom Builds Cookie-Cutter Empire With 3-D Printers

Athey Moravetz is doing some tasty work with her 3-D printers.

The video game designer has worked on PlayStation games like Resistance Retribution and Uncharted Golden Abyss. She's also a self-described "jack-of-all-trades," skilled with 3-D modeling tools like Maya, and knows how to design compelling characters with them.

After having two children she decided to work from home, and in addition to keeping active in the computer graphics industry, she also created a wildly successful Etsy shop, where she sells 3-D printed cookie cutters based on nerd culture favorites Pokemon, Dr. Who and Super Mario Brothers.

While many homemakers have a secret cookie recipe, Moravetz has a small fleet of MakerBots. Her four MakerBot Replicators run simultaneously to keep up with the demand for her products. She says "I turn the bots on when I get up in the morning to get my daughter ready for school. So they turn on about 8 am, and they're running all day long from that point until an automated timer I've got them plugged into, turns them off at 3am. That way I can get in one last print started as I'm going to bed."

While her business is booming now, the idea was originally far less epic. She says "We jokingly said that maybe we could print little trinkets and sell them on Etsy to pay for the MakerBot — while honestly not believing we could do this. It was just an excuse to ourselves for dropping two grand on something we didn't really 'need'."

Moravetz's creations have yielded 829 sales. With prices ranging from $3.75 to $22.50, this sure beats the average bake sale.

Designing cookie cutters requires design skill — not every game character makes for a good cookie. Moravetz says "I had a lot of people requesting Dr. Who stuff — Tardis and Dalek specifically. A Dalek just doesn't read unless you include the inner detail — the silhouette is only readable to a certain degree. It needs the inner detail. But it needs a lot of small inner detail, and I try to avoid cutters going over three and a half inches in any direction. I made a four inch Dalek, but it took nearly two and a half hours to print, and when you're getting as many orders as I am right now, any cutter that takes that long to print is hardly worth it." Like Dr. Who, she outwitted the Dalek and now offers it for sale alongside the Tardis.

Having 3-D printers at home makes developing new products faster than sending them out to service bureaus. Moravetz shares a story of how she used her 3-D printer to break a reluctant pony. She says "Another one that's been difficult is Princess Celestia from My Little Pony. Almost every time I print a cutter off for the first time, there's something wrong with it. First prints are never perfect. I always have to go back and make some lines thicker, and some thinner, or add in some extra supports because an area was too flimsy and prone to cracking."

With four 3-D printers in use now, one might think Moravetz is set for production capacity, but like any good manufacturer, she's always evaluating the new options. However, even though now as nearly as many 3-D printers as Pokemon characters, new releases are a poor match for her product category and production needs. She says "I've taken a look at the Replicator 2, since it's supposed to be a lot more stable mechanically, and faster. But the Replicator 2 only uses PLA, and PLA melts in the dishwasher, so it won't work for cookie cutters. The Replicator 2X is for ABS, but it's still 'experimental' and isn't even for sale yet."

Next generation, light based systems like the Form 1 and B9 Creator are interesting to Moravetz, especially the increased accuracy, but her unique production constraints make it an unlikely pairing. "Just the same, the extra steps necessary in production — dealing with the liquid resin and all the mess that would entail; chemical bath of the prints when they're done to cure the object; cleanup — is not something I'm honestly interested in at the moment," she says. "Plus, I have no idea how food-safe the resin would be or how those prints would hold up to a dishwasher. So it wouldn't really work for me."

With nearly $10,000 worth of 3-D printing gear in her home office, Moravetz has been keen to find other applications for her tools. "Costume stuff is actually the first 'commission' type things I did with the Makerbot," she says. "But cosplay commissions are super work and time consuming, and the amount of plastic needed for some of these props, in addition to the time it takes to print pieces that big, makes it really not cost effective. Most people wanted things that were too big for the printer to do, anyway, so I'd have to print them in pieces and then use Bondo to put them together and sand it and paint it and…. you get the picture."

Still, for all the trouble, she was able to produce a pretty sweet Portal Gun replica.